Vista and the bloggers

This is my first real blog post on the new site. Geek Alert: this is heavily technical.

A few days ago Mary Jo Foley wrote a nice piece about Vista, looking for the killer app. In that article she asks where it is, one year on. Methinks that, that is exactly the wrong question. The real question is; Is Vista a significant step forward from XP? I think that it is.

I look at the XP/Vista relationship about the same as the WinNT/Win2k relationship where; Win2K finally met the promises that WinNT made and failed to deliver. Win2k was arguably the best version of Windows ever and it may still be. It is certainly the last unencumbered one. I, for one, am not going to upgrade my Win2k AS servers any time soon. However, I feel that I have been falling behind steadily. While I acknowledge that XP had some good points, they didn’t sell me, as a developer. In the meanwhile XP gained a nasty reputation of wanting to phone home (MS) and ratting out the user over the smallest thing, giving MS the ability to bring the entire computer to a grinding halt.

Many were the horror stories of a looming deadline when XP suddenly decided that the current version of MS-Office was bogus, locking itself up in a sulk, along with the project’s source code. The launch version of Vista was, if anything, even more paranoid. However, a year down-range finds a heavily debugged Vista and a much chastened Microsoft. Oh, and the hated kill-switch has been defanged. They’ve also merged the product line-up, merging the technical and business versions into Vista Ultimate (another 200USD), which should have been there all along.

The core of my working toolkit is the Eclipse IDE and reviewing the past year of consternation in those forums, I’m glad I waited this long before going to Vista. The current MyEclipse v6 works just fine. Likewise, the small subset of the CygWin kernel that I use. But I am sure that a lot of those developers spent an inordinate amount of the last year cussing at Microsoft, with cause.

Enough with the teething problems. Now that Vista appears to be working, for various definitions of "working", it seems like a pretty nice vehicle. You get IIS7, a significant step up from IIS5. I already have it running PHP5 with no problems. Likewise, the current MySQL5 is also running smoothly. Tomcat (Java development) fired right up alongside IIS7 and they co-exist peaceably. I have both the MS VisualStudio components and the GNU Mingware C++ components working, each in their own sandbox. PHP5 development, with all the GUI-based page builders and stuff, is really nice, as is the usual Java development environment that comes with Eclipse.

Then there is IE7. Those bypassing that and going straight to FireFox are missing a bet. FireFox can never integrate with Vista and IIS7 like IE7 can. Web Applications written for FireFox will work with IE7, including the AJAX stuff. The standards (MS v. W3C) are merging as we watch and it’s about time!

As a WAS (Web Application Server), IIS7 also performs well, running current versions of Mediawiki, Wordpress, Bbpress, and PHPBB, with no problems. While there are issues of getting themes to coordinate, those were there anyway. I was also able to get some J2EE stuff to work. In short, it makes a good platform for general development and unit testing. Even subversion likes living there.

The commercial applications is where we had the really expensive surprises. Our old MS-Office 2K was just too crufty for Vista and would not install. We wound up having to go to MS Office 2007 Professional. It’s also the only way to get the current version of Outlook. Once we got that in, I had to upgrade the Sync programs for my Motorola K1t KRZR and the Palm TX PDA and get those sorted with the new Outlook07. As a side-note about MS-Office; Without getting into sordid details, Europeans are getting ripped off in a major way. The EC needs to bitch-slap Microsoft some more. Suffice it to say, I don’t like paying three times the normal price for software just because I am living in Europe. I still need Visio and I am seriously considering OEM Ripperware for it. Now I know why that market channel is thriving.

Oh yes, all of the above is running on my new HP Laptop (too large to be a notebook).

Specs; For ~ 900CHF (788USD)

1. Hewlett-Packard HP Pavilion dv6500 Notebook PC Rev 1
2. 1.70 gigahertz AMD Athlon 64 X2 Dual-Core TK-53
3. 960 Megabytes Installed Memory
4. FUJITSU MHW2120BH [Hard drive] (120.03 GB)
5. NVIDIA MCP67M [Display adapter]
6. Generic PnP Monitor (15.4"vis, August 2007)

I’m being cautious in fully moving in until I have the entire environment working but so far, I like Vista and I think that we’ll get along just fine. Yes, you cannot get a new laptop without Vista, except from Dell, and Vista drivers will not work on Win2K AS. So I was forced into this but the water is surprisingly fine Overall, I have been surprised and the surprises are not entirely unpleasant. I expect, like with Win2K, the reliability will only improve over time.

In the mean time, I have the ultimate weapon for the independent contractor. This laptop can hook into anything, anywhere, do it safely, and generate code for any target host specified, while I crank out the dox with MS-Office and Acrobat 8. In the end, that’s really what it’s all about. Old rule of software development; First get it working and only then do you consider making it work better. Microsoft and the Open Source Community have spent the last year just getting Vista to work. The development tools are only just barely out there. For the moment, be happy that it works and is a significant improvement over XP. The killer apps? Well, I don’t expect them until next year, at best. For now, this is good enough.